Ask HN: What are the most promising/interesting new programming languages?

23 points by baccheion ↗ HN

22 comments

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I Would say Elixir is a big up-and-comer. The BEAM VM is really a marvellous piece of engineering, and now that there's a language that looks nice and feels nice (no offense erlang) i think a LOT of people will be looking that way. Especially since nowadays people are getting more into websockets and realtime communication, elixir is perfect for this.
Plus one for Elixir, it's what my smart friends who would learn Scala 5 years ago are doing now.
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It sounds quite petty but the string support in Elixir looks great after reading over some Erlang material not too long ago.
Elixir is great. Simple and powerful. I just wish the size of the Erlang distribution was small so that I could use Elixir for desktop apps as well, as currently it would require a 100 mb VM for people to run even a 10 line script.

I have not used Elixir for anything big. I would really love to try elixir someday for bigger apps. Is there a Elixir-to-JS compiler somewhere? Nodejs is much smaller in size than BEAM. So distributing Elixir apps would be easier.

I'm reading a lot about Elixir on HN, what are good resources to start learning it?
I recommend the books Programming Elixir and Elixir in Action. The latter is a little more advanced in terms of expecting some prior knowledge in functional programming but is a fantastic book nonetheless as well as a great resource for a basic understanding of OTP. The Elixir-lang website also is very good for understanding some of the basics related to the language. The language itself has great documentation.
I agree. I'm learning Elixir right now, and I think it'll inject a lot more enthusiasm back into the Erlang stack.

Phoenix also feels like the extension to Rails.

Just looked at elixer and it seems really cool, but I'd like it better, i think, if it had typing like golang interfaces.

(I'm assuming the comparisons to ruby mean that it is very loosely typed, but I could be wrong). I wouldn't want to build a highly distributed app without a bunch of compiler help.

I like the ideas of Rust and the syntax of Nim.
For me, it's -

1) Red - Small in size; Readable, compact and concise code. Its a powerful All-in-One Package with lots of great features as well as easy for newcomers. It can be used for low level as well as high level programming.

http://www.red-lang.org/

2) Rust - Its powerful concepts of borrowing and ownership, and its tight security features are just great. But its kinda verbose.

3) Nim - Clean, readable code. Fast compile times as well as compiled code. Lots of good ideas in it. Different gc's for different use cases are great.

I am a big fan of Nim. It's one of the few languages that gets me excited lately as it feels like you can do pretty much anything that you could do in C++ but in simplified code and shorter dev times.
Can red compile GUI apps in MacOS? I just tried and it errored out..
I will have to say Rust has got me the most excited. But Kotlin and Elixir are also interesting in their design approaches.
Nim, Rust, Erlang/Elixer, Shen, and Haskell are my picks.

But if you don't already know C and Scheme, go back and learn those. The classics can teach you as much is the cutting edge.